Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America that was coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.
He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Available at Amazon. Also available at Barnes & Noble or other book stores.

Thomas Merton: The Only Known Photograph of God

An avowed rationalist, W.C. Fields was reading a Gideon Bible in a hotel room when his manager entered. "Bill," said the manager, "What the hell are you doing? I thought you were an atheist."
"Just looking for loopholes," said Fields. "Just looking for loopholes."

A Dance to the Secrets of Time and Motion: The Pendulum Wave

Notice that at first the swinging balls form a line, then fall out of sync, forming snakes, squiggles and spirals. Our brains are wired to predict everyday behavior. We need math to understand this. Yet the world blunders on, trusting what is comfortably predictable.

Bats & Echolocation: Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See

Fugue:
My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and
play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only
recognize myself as a symphony.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietCounter Fugue:
What I cannot build, I cannot understand.
—Richard Feynman, physicist. as quoted by Craig Venter & encoded as a watermark in DNA of the first ever synthetic organism.

Clouds & ClocksAll they have in common are the first three letters.
You can disassemble clocks. You can reduce them to their parts, then put them back together. You can't do that with clouds. Therein lies the difference between reductionism and emergent systems, as well as reductionism & the unnameable. It depends on your point of view.

More Is Different: EmergenceAs P.W. Anderson had it, here is a broken symmetry. A new level of understanding must be created before we can move on to the next level. You cannot be explained in terms of the particles which compose you.

You are here in the Milky Way Galaxy, 1 of about 100 billion in the visible universe. This is not science-fiction.

We are all conceived in close prison, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. . .
But we sleep all the way. From the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake.(John Donne, Sermons)

Foucault Pendulum

In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) demonstrated the Earth turning. At the Paris Pantheon, the pendulum revealed reality not as it seems. Human kind
cannot bear very much reality, said TS Eliot. People are comfortable in the way things seem. Some guests in 1851 thought the pendulum moved with Earth stationary. But gravity kept it moving in the same plane as Earth turned along with the building from which it hung. They felt none of it, just as we feel none of the following phenomena. Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.

2/4/09

Theodore Dalrymple: The Politics and Culture of Decline

Theodore Dalrymple has been compared to George Orwell. His German mother fled to Britain from the Nazis; his father had been a communist activist. He has lived as a physician in a ragged, dusty Tanzanian village. He has talked to prisoners locked away from the dizzying spin of daily London life. He has been arrested as a spy in Gabon. South African police sought to arrest him for violating apartheid. He infiltrated an English communist group to attend a youth festival in North Korea. He performed in an Afghan Shakespeare play. He smuggled books to dissidents in Ceaucescu's Romania. He was arrested and beaten by Albanian police for photographing an anti-government demonstration. He ran a psychiatric clinic in the Gilbert Islands. In East Timor police put him under surveillance. Riding with chickens, bouncing on dirt roads, he has taken public transportation across both Africa and South America. In Africa, he treated "children bitten by puff adders," and "adults mauled by leopards."

As a boy he precociously read the classics and studied arguments for and against God. He favors Shakespeare, Chekov, and Turgenev for their insights into the evils, follies, and goodness of human nature. As a doctor he worked in a London slum hospital and saw a side of modern civilization television and newspapers sweep under the carpet.

With his experiences and travels he is equipped to see through the veneer of modern Western civilization. He distrusts contemporary ideas and covert ideologies. He sees an intellectual trend toward elevating the individual at the cost of society. Conventional limits on individual behavior are being eroded. Academics embrace complex and absurd theories that are mindlessly absorbed by popular culture, only to the detriment of the masses who believe that is the way things are. Intellectuals have replaced straightforward explanations of anti-social behavior with such complex theories. For him, these theories are downright stupid.

In Africa, he saw true poverty. Yet people did not lose their work ethic, nor their dignity. Survival was itself an accomplishment to be proud of. By comparison, Dalrymple found that England’s slum-dwellers had lives “as saturated with arbitrary violence as that of the inhabitants of many a dictatorship.” The difference for Dalrymple? In England and in the West “the evil is freely chosen.” People in the West have no despots forcing them into their behavior. What, then, has happened? Western civility and values have declined because the ideas of intellectuals were absorbed willingly, without close examination, into the culture.

Theodore Dalrymple has now moved to France. The British welfare state takes care of so much in personal life that people have few options--television, shopping, sex. He considers the growth of social pathologies and the decline of cultural, moral and aesthetic standards in Britain more far-reaching and alarming than similar processes in the United States. It is happening in the States and is also a juggernaut. He does not deceive himself about France. A sign in the kitchen of his French home evokes the stiff-upper-lip Britain of yesteryear: Keep calm and carry on.

A doctor from Madras worked with Dalrymple at a London hospital. The physician was impressed with the medical care given all patients, the cleanliness, the know-how, but slowly he began to understand something else. A man over-dosed on heroin and was wheeled into intensive care where nurses and physicians cared for him around the clock. When he came to, his first words were "Get me a fuckin' roll-up." No gratitude, no courtesy, just demand for some weed.

The Indian doctor came to realize that a different kind of poverty existed in Dalrymple's country. "The squalor of England was not economic but spiritual, moral, and cultural."

Dalrymple says this of John Money, who persuaded David Reimer's parents that the boy should be "sexually reassigned" and raised as girl because of genital damage during circumcision: "By 1994, John Money, perhaps the most influential academic sexologist of the last third of the twentieth century, was still able to write in all seriousness that we live in an anti-sexual and taboo-ridden society. Get rid of the remaining taboos, he implied, and human unhappiness will take care of itself." A creature of his era and its sexual revolution, Money "insisted on the 'infinite plasticity' of gender identity."

As to the sexual revolution, he says this: "A schoolteacher friend recently told me how she had comforted a seven-year-old who was in tears because a girl in his class had insulted him, calling him a virgin. She asked whether he knew what the word meant.

'No,' replied the little boy. 'But I know it's something horrible.' "

On Kinsey's famous sex survey: "A survey of the kind [Kinsey] conducted into financial probity would surely have revealed that there is hardly a person in the world who has never in his life been dishonest—who has never taken so much as a paper clip or overestimated expenses on a tax return. No sensible person would conclude from this that the striving for honesty is a sham, that it is pointless to have any laws regarding financial conduct, that it is perfectly all right for shopkeepers to shortchange their customers and for their customers to steal from them. And yet this is precisely what the sexual revolutionaries, Kinsey foremost among them, have argued in the realm of sex."

spiritrambler(at)gmail.com

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. W.B.Yeats

I have had a dream, past the wit of
man to say what dream it was.A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iv, i.&nbsp
On John Van Druten's gravestone

Martians are discussing humans, after one of them has visited Earth:
"These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat. . . .They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat."
"So . . .what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal. Are you getting the picture?"
(From "They're Made out of Meat" by Terry Bisson. Of such a contention, Colin McGinn says we are not equipped to explain the experience of consciousness.)

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

God and the Devil are talking, looking down at the desert where one of God's chosen is having a sacred vision. "You see," says God.” Now you will be out of business because my child has realized the Truth."Not at all," says the Devil. "I will help him organize it."

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/
Is my destroyer./
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas

Time is the school in which we learn.

Time is the fire in which we burn.(Delmore Schwarz)

It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things. &nbsp Ernst Mach

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. Ernest HemingwayI can imagine Jack The Ripper also saying this. John